Personally, I had enjoyed Raiders immensely and I recall being eager to absorb similar media back then but, for whatever reason, I was unable to watch more than a handful of episodes of Tales of the Gold Monkey when it was first broadcast. I'm sure it aired at a time which conflicted with something else, but I couldn't tell you what. In any event, I do remember enjoying what little I did see and being disappointed I couldn't watch more of it; I'm pretty sure they didn't even air it in re-runs during the subsequent summer.
Watching the show now, some four decades later, it feels very painfully of its time. I'm sure it wasn't considered a cheap show -- indeed, speculation today is that it was cancelled in part because of its comparatively higher costs -- but it still had the constraint of an early 1980s TV show budget. Everything looks like a set. Expensive effects shots get re-used throughout the series; some of the clips are very clearly then-40-year-old stock footage. The scripts feature a lot of casual sexism prevalent in the 1980s, on top of the more overt sexism of the late 1930s that's added to make it more period appropriate. One of the characters is an alcoholic, which is frequently played for laughs. There's a disturbing amount of yellow-face (although they start to get somewhat better in using Asian actors about a third of the way through the season) and there's a lot of overbroad cultural stereotypes used for pretty much every non-American character.
The episodes are of radically varying levels of quality. Some are quite good and touch on some interesting themes; others feel like every other page from the script was cut. Several have decent stories, but run into pacing issues that come from being forced into a tight run-time with very specific times needed for commercial breaks. You could very much tell when they had a 30-minute story and threw in 15 minutes of padding, or when they had an hour story and had to speed run the whole thing to get it down to 45 minutes. Certainly a lot of problems, too, stemmed from having a large array of writers -- there were few episodes with less than three credited writers and few writers who contributed to more than a single episode.
As I said, though, it is very much of its time. All of those issues were given a pass in the 1980s because that's just how things were. Hell, the fact that one of the secondary characters is wheelchair-bound and that's literally never commented on makes the show downright progressive for its time! But overall, while the show has its moments, it can be hard to sit through and that's why it's taken me over a year to watch -- I simply could not force myself through the series without taking long breaks between episodes.
What does that have to do with comic books?
As I was watching through the episodes, I found myself thinking things like, "Wow, that effect looks cheap!" Or "Why is this scene dragging on so long?" Or "This fight choreography is crap!" There is plenty to criticize throughout the show. But at some point towards the end of the series, I happened across a bit of trivia where Caitlin O'Heaney's character is supposed to get upset and throw a rice bowl she's carrying. But if you look carefully, in the specific shot when she throws the bowl, there's nothing in her hand. She just pretends to throw the bowl off-camera and there's a smashing sound effect heard. That particular shot, it turns out, was actually just a rehearsal where they happened to have the cameras rolling. For whatever reason, O'Heaney delivered a better performance in that rehearsal and they opted to use that take since her hand is only visible for a few frames and the previous shots had already firmly established she had a rice bowl in her hands. It's a technical error, but it wasn't practical to 'fix' it (by re-filming) so they danced around it as much as they could (mostly by the use of the smashing sound effect) and it works well enough for the story beat.
And that's relevant to comics because we're talking about art made in a commercial setting. Setting aside whatever limitations in skill a creator has, there are practical considerations that go into every project. The effects look cheap because they didn't have a budget to make better ones, so they did the best they could. The scene is dragging on because the network required precisely 47 minutes of run-time, and something needs to be stretched out to fill that space. The fight choreography is crap because the original choreographer was ill, and the replacement came in at the last minute and had very little time to work with the actors. That's not to say that every visible problem is the result of some random externality no one had control over and is therefore beyond criticism. Obviously, as a creator, you want to minimize those types of issues as much as possible and, for good or ill, your work will be viewed as professional or not in part based on how many of those external factors you're able to mitigate.
But these issues are very much worth considering if you are a creator and are looking at these other works to learn from them. Many of the now-classic comic book stories were written as serial adventures to be told over months, not in a read-it-all-in-one-sitting collected edition. There's going to be set up and paced for a month-long break between "chapters." The original Superman story from Action Comics #1 was designed as a newspaper comic strip, so it has the pacing for that; it was also designed to be read with more line details and no color.
My whole point being that, when you're looking at a piece of work for inspiration or to study and learn from, try to consider the practical limitations those creators might've dealt with. It won't and shouldn't act as an excuse for any problems/issues you find, but seeing how they might've dealt with those problems can be as enlightening as understanding the parts where everything worked perfectly!
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